Of Sloppy Steve and Sartorial Semiotics

Now that he’s been convicted of criminal contempt of Congress and may (again) be facing jail time, the repulsive Steve Bannon is back in the news.

Of all the orcs who dance attendance on their bloated master, Bannon may be the most physically disgusting. With his greasy, shaggy hair, bloodshot, baggy eyes, porcine jowls, pocked and raddled hide which alternately flushes and pales in a manner indicative of significant cardiac issues, and a physique of about the same shape and consistency as a rotten watermelon, you just can’t help but wonder if the evil in his soul hasn’t corrupted the rest of him. It’s not often that I agree with #FatDonnyPeaches, but when he called Bannon “Sloppy Steve” during one of their little tiffs, I found myself hard-pressed to contradict him.

Does this make any sense to you? Keep reading. It will. 

But perhaps no aspect of his physical appearance elicits as much comment as his clothing—specifically, his tendency to pile one shirt on top of another. On any given day, Bannon might sport a tee shirt under a polo shirt under a button-down shirt under another button-down shirt under a sport jacket under a Barbour coat. If you’re counting layers, that’s six.

Considering what all those layers must do on a hot day to a guy with a sagging, flabby build and, if appearance is anything to go by, questionable personal hygiene, such a getup understandably mystifies people.  

“Steve Bannon’s Penchant for Wearing Several Shirts at Once Confuses People Across the Political Spectrum,” reads a 2022 headline from Distractify.

“Why does Steve Bannon wear all his shirts at once?” wonders Morwenna Ferrier in The Guardian, quoting Joshua Green, Bannon’s biographer, who says, “I’ve never been able to figure it out. I don’t have any idea. It’s the weirdest sartorial style I have ever encountered.”

Karen Fratti at Hello Giggles indulges in a little journalistic bait and switch with the teasing headline “We finally know why Steve Bannon always wears so many shirts,” but then fails to deliver, when she concludes, “So we don’t really know precisely why Bannon wears multiple shirts… America may never know.”

Even the venerable GQ, which really ought to know better, fumbled the ball in a piece entitled, “Steve Bannon Doesn’t Understand Layering,” the tone of which hovered somewhere between bewildered and condemnatory.  

Olivia Nuzzi at The Cut gets a little closer with her article “Here’s Why Steve Bannon Wears So Many Shirts” wherein she quotes friends of his who claim that he picked up the habit at Benedictine College Preparatory, the Catholic military institute he attended as a teenager. But, as someone who went there pointed out, students wear the kind of army-guy cosplay uniforms that such schools require (and those don’t come with multiple shirts), and added, “I don’t know what the uniform was exactly when Mr. Bannon was here,” but “there’s not multiple shirts.”

But we’re getting there, and the answer is far more interesting than it may seem at first glance. What began as a “What the actual fuck, Hog Steve? Forget to take off yesterday’s clothes before you put today’s on?” gives way to a question that that sheds significant light on the mind of Steve Bannon. Which, considering he got us into the mess we’re in now, is an important question.

The semiotics of clothing is a woefully underutilized analytic tool, and I don’t understand why pundits and commentators don’t use it more. What people wear tells you an awful lot about them. Frequently more than they’d like you to know. They tell us not only about a person’s background, but what the wearer WANTS us to think about his background.

§§§

I read these articles with a chuckle because I knew immediately what he was up to, as would anyone who, like me,  

1) Grew up in the 80’s, and

2)  Went to a college where the pretensions of its students far outweighed the school’s actual prestige. 

This last is a crucial piece of the puzzle, and bears a little explication.

I went to a small, private, liberal arts Christian college in Indiana called Taylor University. This was, out of a strong field of contenders, the biggest mistake I ever made, but that’s a topic for another blog post.

As a Christian college, Taylor by definition lacked the prestige of secular schools of similar size and vintage (1846) like a Bates (1855), an Amherst (1821) or a Swarthmore (1864). It didn’t even have the prestige of a Midwestern liberal arts college like a DePauw or a Denison.

Nonetheless, it had a bit of cachet in the evangelical world, and had among its students a certain group of kids—largely from the east coast, but with a smattering from places like Cleveland, Chicago and Detroit—from wealthy families high up in the food chain of the Christian world. These kids all seemed to know each other from having gone to the same Christian prep schools and Christian summer camps. Many of their parents sat on the boards of the same Christian institutions. 

At Taylor, they formed an elite clique which attracted second-tier hangers-on (like me): kids whose families were not part of this wealthy Christian network, but who were mesmerized by their tales of boarding school, summers spent sailing on the Atlantic and visiting each other's summer houses, and their general aura of privilege, superiority and connectedness.  

There was another reason I gravitated toward them: I knew Taylor was no great shakes. It chewed at me. But hanging around these kids let me pretend Taylor was a lot more prestigious than it was (part of the “Ivy League of Christian schools,” as another hanger-on like me called it). I aped their attitudes, their mannerisms and their look, which, for lack of a better word, we’ll call “preppy.”

I had no idea what I was doing. My background was nothing like theirs (St. Louis Jewish on my mother’s side, Indiana farmers on my father's). Like any tyro, I made a mortifying hash of it, and suffered my share of deserved ridicule. I needed an instruction manual. Luckily, I found one at the public library. It was Lisa Birnbach’s “The Official Preppy Handbook.”

The Handbook had been out for about nine years by the time I found it and it was, ostensibly, a work of satire mocking the foibles and lifestyles of America’s old-money elites. But the book’s almost sociological precision tells a different story. Birnbach might claim to mock her subject, but it’s pretty obvious that she wanted to be part of it, and so did I.

We weren’t alone. The book’s impact in the 80’s was enormous. It exposed, in anthropological detail, a world that most middle-class Americans had vaguely intimated from having seen the Kennedys or having read “A Separate Peace” or “Love Story”, but never really known anything about. The Handbook revealed a world of inherited wealth and prestige, privilege, and luxury. In a money-obsessed decade, it wasn’t satirical, it was aspirational. Those who read it wanted to be a part of it. God knows I did. 

Well, tough luck. Pedigree is fundamental to prepdom, and you can’t fake that. You’re either born to a long line of loaded blueblooded Episcopalians with tons of cash or you aren’t. But there WAS a consolation prize: the Handbook showed you could dress like it.  

And doing so was easier and cheaper than you might have thought. One of the defining characteristics of this class is its abhorrence of ostentation, which means the clothes really aren’t all that expensive. They’re good quality, but brands like Orvis, Pendleton, Gant, L.L. Bean, J. Press, and Brooks Brothers—and plagiarists like Lands End, Ralph Lauren, J. Crew and Vineyard Vines—won’t break the bank.

Anyone who pored over the Handbook would instantaneously know where Bannon’s shirt over shirt over shirt look came from: 

 

This is what Bannon's up to--appropriating the look so that people think he's the old-money, elite, Establishment. 

But he doesn’t quite pull it off. He fails (spectacularly) in two ways: 

    1. He doesn’t get the attitude.

After years of mulling this over, I think I’ve figured out what the real key to dressing like a genuine prep is. It’s not the careful assemblage of elements. It’s insouciance. 

"Trying too hard" is the antithesis of the prep ethos. Real preps just don’t give a fuck about projecting an image. They don’t need to. They have nothing to prove. There’s no intentionality. They simply wake up from a hangover in their dorm room at Dartmouth or Brown or Vanderbilt or wherever with five minutes to get to class and they throw on whatever’s near to hand. If it’s cold, they’ll throw on a couple of shirts, maybe a jacket that they found wadded up under the bed and they’ll dash out rumpled, unmatched, uncombed and untucked.

And they’ll look fabulous doing it. Because it’s not really about what you wear, it’s how you wear it. If you wear it with confidence, then you’ll look terrific in whatever you’ve got on.

As the great menswear writer G. Bruce Boyer said of George H.W. Bush, who was the real McCoy (Greenwich Country Day, Phillips Academy, Yale), “He has that Old Money Look and will wear boat shoes and checks with plaids in that kind of nonchalant way that says “screw you.”

And as Boyer said of someone who doesn’t pull it off (Tucker Carlson), “I look at him and say it may be natural for him, but it doesn’t look natural. It looks like he’s trying too hard, but I can’t quite put my finger on why.”

In other words, even with all the right ingredients, if you don’t have the right attitude, it’ll show.

2.  2. He doesn’t know when to do it. 

Real preps know when to grow up. By the time they reach adulthood, they know damn well not to dress from the dorm room floor. They, like the rest of us, put on suits and ties and go to work, leaving the shirt over shirt (over shirt over shirt) look back at college. Look at the real preps: William Barr (Horace Mann, Columbia, George Washington Law School) and John Bolton (McDonogh School, Yale, Yale Law).

Barring certain unprep elements of their backgrounds (Barr’s father was Jewish and Bolton’s was a fireman), they both have pretty unimpeachable prep credentials, and it shows in how they dress. Unless you’re looking, you’d never notice (which is precisely what real preps want), but there are subtle, yet undeniable tells: the roll of the collar, the width and knot of tie and lapels, the tie patterns (repp or small repeating images), the cut of the suit, the shape of the shoe’s toe. 

Unlike the rest of the Trump coterie, they never started dressing like #FatDonnyPeaches. Look at how Kevin McCarthy's and Mike Pence's outfits changed over the four miserable years of his regime. But Barr and Bolton stuck to the same rumpled Brooks Brothers button-downs, boxy J. Press suits, and round horn- or wire-rimmed glasses they’ve worn since the 80’s.

(Such sartorial independence indicates a certain independence of mind. Barr and Bolton’s loyalties were never to #FatDonnyPeaches himself, but rather to their convictions. They’re ghastly convictions, but at least they have them. This is borne out by their conduct. Bolton left in disgust and wrote a tell-all book, and Barr, in the absence of any evidence of “widespread voter fraud,” informed his boss that DOJ wasn’t going to pursue the matter and quit.)

But Bannon (Benedictine College Preparatory – which, as a Catholic military school, can’t, prepwise, carry the jocks of Phillips Exeter, St. Paul’s, Groton or Choate--and Virginia Tech, not even in the team photo) is an ersatz prep. And he dresses like one. His laughable outfits don’t fool anyone who’s really looking, but they do tell us what he WANTS us to think, and in doing so, lay bare his pretensions, his insecurities and his fundamental mendacity. They tell us he’s a poser and a phony.

In essence, they echo the lie he sold to half the nation—that a cheap and tacky real estate developer was a true titan of industry, that a thrice-divorced perpetual adulterer was a paragon of Christian morality, and that a known crook was the proper repository of the nation’s trust.  

If only we’d known what all those shirts meant.  

A Modest Proposal for a Thought Experiment.

 I know this is long, but bear with me.

The year is 2035, and the United States is on the ropes like it's never been before. A long economic decline and deep internal rifts have weakened the country from inside, and it's flat broke after a two-decade Cold War with the Pacific Security Alliance, an organization of states in east Asia led by China.

The PSA's overwhelming military might, fueled by a juggernaut economy, is one that the U.S. simply can't compete with. We try. But eventually and inevitably, we realize that we're outgunned. 

Finally, the U.S. accepts the inevitable. We can't maintain our hegemony even over our own sphere of influence. We disband the OAS, the Organization of American States, and we admit that our time as a global superpower is kaput.  

We're a little worried, however, about Korea. As we contract, we can no longer maintain the South Korean client state. North Korea, still led by Kim Jong Un and backed by China's military and economic might, is pushing hard for reunification. 

As a condition of Korean reunification, the United States and China hammer out a deal. We'll leave, but China agrees not to extend the PSA, into our traditional sphere of influence, and the U.S. leaves East Asia, likely for good. 

A coup is launched in Washington. The president is deposed, and a China-friendly president assumes power. He's a coarse, uneducated opiate addict from the sticks who embarrasses the United States, but who is lauded internationally as a champion of democracy and the man who will lead America out of its dark past and into the new international order. 

The collapse of the United States is devastating internally. What's left of our economy implodes, our standard of living plummets, and the United States, the existence of which seemed all but eternally assured, comes apart. Texas and California, which between them constitute the sixth largest economy in the world, spin off. and declare their independence. 

Losing two huge chunks of the country is traumatic and a colossal blow to our national ego, but it's survivable. With strong linguistic, cultural and economic ties to the United States, they appear to remain, for now, within the United States' faded and shrunken orbit. 

With a compliant puppet as head of state, the looting of the United States begins. There's some pro forma concern about America's still formidable nuclear arsenal, and some proposals floated to remove our warheads from our territory by force, but nothing really comes of them. The world is too busy ripping America off. Foreign venture capitalists, largely from Asia, working in tandem with a crop of shady American billionaires who have emerged from the rubble to rob their own country, buy up American farmland, American industry, American railroads, airlines and airports, mines, oilfields, refineries, refineries, truck fleets and pipelines. America's vast natural resources are systematically despoiled by international capitalists who take whatever they feel like with impunity. 

The American economy continues to plunge. Overnight, people's 401ks disappear, and their savings dry up like vapor. There's mass starvation. Desperate women turn to prostitution in astounding numbers. American prostitutes become so ubiquitous in the brothels of Montreal, Havana, Kingstown and Mexico City that a new slang term for whore emerges: "Kellys." For many families, the income that the Kellys send home is their only source of revenue. 

Less than five years after the PSA assured the United States that it would stay out of America's traditional sphere of influence, they renege. Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Canada all join the PSA to great fanfare. The United States is powerless to resist. 

The American president, his body gross and corrupted by indulgence and smack, croaks. A new president takes his place. The world isn't sure what to make of him. He's a career CIA man, and sizable chapters of his pre-political life remain opaque. What is known of him is that he is an American patriot and he regards the collapse of the United States and its hegemony over the Western Hemisphere as, quote, "one of the greatest geopolitical disasters ever to befall humanity." 

The new president immediately goes to work. He attacks the opioid epidemic by cutting off supply and lining up opioid dealers and shooting them. The world press (without noting that much of these opiates come from China) decries his dismissal of due process.

Not a believer himself, he makes an alliance with the churches, viewing them as potential allies and forces for morality and stability. Such open support for religion, after decades of derision from the cultural elite, comes as both a surprise and a comfort to the American people. 

He begins rebuilding American armed forces. The international commentariat mutters darkly about "the Eagle sharpening its claws again," and Beijing begins to pay close attention. 

Meanwhile, Mexican-American separatists in Arizona and New Mexico see America's weakness as opportunity to secede and rejoin themselves to Mexico. To show they mean business, they blow up some movie theatres and government buildings in Chicago, Detroit and Nevada. A bloody guerrilla war ensues. 

The new American president grinds them down and stamps out the insurrection. It's brutal, but it works. He is excoriated in the international press as a monster, a human-rights violator on a grand scale, and bloodthirsty tyrant. Arguably, he is. But he's got a country to pacify, and public opinion, particularly after the Mexican-American attacks on civilian targets, won't be satisfied with anything less than complete victory. 

The Mexican-American insurrection dealt with, the new president then goes to town on ending the rape of the country. Using anti-corruption as a platform, he arrests those American billionaires who aren't getting on board with his program. The more problematic ones he imprisons. He replaces them with his own long-time associates, people whose loyalty he can trust. He ends the wholesale looting of the country, and he nationalizes the megacompany "joint ventures", rerouting the revenue into the national coffers.

There's a lot of pearl-clutching from the international commentariat about "the stifling of free enterprise." The international papers call him:

• A domestic tyrant
• A murderer (because, truth be told, he has bumped off a number of his enemies both at home and abroad)
• Contemptuous of institutions (or at least the ones he's not a member of)
• A deliberate saboteur of the world order, gleefully throwing a monkey-wrench into the smoothly running Pax Sinaicana

All of these are, to some extent, true, but it doesn't matter domestically. He's wildly popular. He's perceived as restoring American pride, stanching the bleeding and bringing the Kellys home. 

But he's attracted negative attention. The U.S., say policymakers in Beijing, Seoul and Singapore, must not now and never in future be allowed to become a danger to world order again.

The PSA immediately sponsors a coup in Texas, forcing the U.S.-aligned president of Texas into exile ad replacing him with one more sympathetic to the PSA and the Chinese-led world economic order. They begin selling their produce, their oil and their beef not to the U.S., but to the partner states of the PSA.

The U.S. president isn't happy about that. He views it as a hostile act, as, in fact, it is. But there isn't much he can do about it. 

What he can, and does do, is support those Texans who still consider themselves Americans they're concentrated in the panhandle). He supplies them with arms, money, and other material support in their ongoing low-boil insurrections against the Chinese-aligned government in Austin. 

Things become a little more serious, however, when Texas begins making noises about repossessing Sheppard AFB in north Texas, along the Oklahoma border. For a long time, this base hasn't been a problem. Texas lets the U.S. use it in the interest of good relations. But the change in direction and the U.S.'s possible loss of it reconfigure the calculus significantly. This base is critical to the U.S.'s security. In desperation, the U.S. scrambles the personnel already there, and occupies the area along the Red River where the base is located. It's not tough to do--most of the people living there are U.S.-aligned anyhow, and glad to be back in the Union. 

But it's regarded internationally as an act of lawlessness, an attack on a sovereign nation. Dark comparisons to Hitler and the Indian Wars are made. 

The PSA kicks into high gear. At a summit in Tokyo (which is now part of the PSA), China announces that both California and Texas will become fully-fledged members of the PSA. Vietnam and Japan, both of which have tussled with the U.S. before, express some hesitation. It's also noted that Texas, as a sinkhole of corruption, may not meet the standards of transparency necessary for membership in the PSA, but their voices are dismissed. It's China who calls the shots, and China wants Texas and California in the PSA. 

This is unacceptable to the American president. California and Texas are his country's largest trading-partners. Traditionally, they've always been part of the United States. And strategically, it could be disastrous. The panhandle cuts deep into the U.S. heartland, uncomfortably close to the national breadbasket of Kansas and to major U.S. military installations in New Mexico. Having a Chinese ally deep in the interior of your landmass is a dagger at your heart.  

He objects strongly. He says, openly and publicly, that PSA membership for Texas is unacceptable. He points out, reasonably enough, that the PSA is already on his northern and southern borders--both Canada and Mexico are members. He says that the United States has no interest in either annexing Texas, nor any plans to threaten its independence, but, at the very most, he needs to keep Texas officially neutral. 

(Privately, he'd like Texas back. But he knows he has no chance of that. Half the country likes its independence, and he has no desire to get bogged down in a war of occupation. So his demands remain well within the realm of both the possible, and, from his point of view, the reasonable.) 

It's a bitter pill to swallow, having to settle for the neutrality of an area that used to be part of your country. But it's the most he can ask for and expect to get. Still, it doesn't work. 

"The U.S. is on the march again," the world press shrieks. "The American president, a sinister tyrant at home, is once again threatening the peace and stability of the region. It's nothing but old-fashioned American Manifest Destiny raising its ugly head again. And after Texas, then what? Is he going to take back California, too? And then Mexico? And then the rest of Central America? The Eagle can never be satisfied. His appetite for conquest and bloodshed knows no bounds. He's an international rebel and he MUST BE STOPPED NOW." 

The president, with no other choice, begins massing American troops on the borders of Oklahoma and Louisiana. The Texas president, gambling on support from China and the PSA member states in the Western hemisphere, remains defiant. The international press shrieks loudly about Texas's right to national self-determination. They point to Texas's long history of resistance to oppression from Washington, like the late Governor Abbott's historic resistance against federal mask-mandates during the COVID-19 outbreak. And then someone dusts off Texas's ancient history. 

"Did you know,"  the articles crow, "that Texas actually began as an independent Republic? That in 1835, Texas revolted against Mexico and declared itself the Republic of Texas in 1836? That the heroic Mirabeau Lamar advocated permanent independence, but the nefarious U.S. agent Sam Houston undercut him? And that Texas only became part of the United States in 1845? Yes, Texas has a LONG and GLORIOUS tradition of independence, and this is just the latest chapter in the story of the U.S. trying to absorb it." 

(They don't mention that Texas's admission to the Union was delayed because it was a slave state, but no matter. That's a historical quibble, not worthy of mention. The point is, TEXAS HAS A LONG HISTORY OF INDEPENDENCE). 

Preparations to admit Texas to the PSA continue unabated. The Chinese-led world order turns a deaf ear to the American president's demands. "We don't negotiate with terrorists," the world press proudly declares. "We will not heed the demands of the sinister tyrant in his spiderweb in Washington, who's been hacking us for years and trying to undermine the stable and peaceful world order established by the champion of peace and prosperity, Beijing. No negotiation. Accede to Texas's actions. Or else." 

In such a situation, I ask you in all seriousness and sincerity: what should the American president do?